An item in my email this week caught my attention. With wedding season gearing up, my credit union sent an email hawking what they characterized as “EverydayLife Loans” providing extra cash for the big events of life. Naturally, the promotion drew my attention.

Yeah, those “big events” tend to be costly nowadays and the credit union is there to help … including “expenses for your wedding, honeymoon and all the little things along the way.” With rates as low as 8.75% APR, the picture (shown below) showed a celebratory bride and groom and the tag line:  “One less thing to worry about.”

Long, long ago when I was planning our wedding, my Beloved and I agreed our budget was $100 – not a penny more – to get everything done. Yes, it was a small gathering and an uncomplicated ceremony. We didn’t have to rent a facility; who did in those days? Relatives snapped the pictures (at no cost to us), there were no tux rentals, and since I sewed my wedding dress and those of my two bridesmaids, the most expensive items were the engraved invitations and the wedding cake.

In more recent years, of course, our offspring have married and in my view, each wedding was beautifully appointed, though not with ostentation or extravagance. We covered a large part of the costs in each ceremony, but goodness! The expenses weren’t anywhere close to necessitating a loan from a bank!

I understand why a financial institution would hype the availability of its loans for wedding expenses … but the ridiculous notion that an 8.75% loan is going to enable a couple (or their parents) to have “one less thing to worry about” boggles my mind! The way I look at it, the repayment of a loan would logically become one additional thing to worry about!

Perhaps the example of a wealthy friend of ours is instructive. He told his daughters he’d give them $10,000 cash as a wedding present. If either daughter opted for the big wedding (as opposed to a simple ceremony standing before a justice of the peace), costs of the wedding would be deducted from the total cash. If memory serves correctly, one took the cash and eloped while the other opted for the fancy ceremony. I don’t know if either is still married today.

Even as marriage continues to retain its popularity, we’re hearing about other expressions of “relational” connections. Earlier this year, insanitybytes22 posted her thoughts on a growing trend called sologamy, the marriage of someone to one’s self. Last November in the First Things journal, Timothy George also offered his assessment.

This seemingly unorthodox practice of sologamy has been around for more than twenty years according to First Things. When I contemplated the idea of obtaining a consumer loan for this “big event of life,” the absurdity of it struck me. Given some of the matrimonial photos available online, these sologamy celebrations are lavish affairs! (Links here and here and here, for examples.)

After I completed the poem (below), I held off posting until now. After reading about banks loaning money for weddings, it just seemed like the two notions deserved to be “married” – so to speak – in the same blog post! Naturally, I’d be curious to know if the credit union would consider sologamy a worthy risk for a loan, say $10,000-$20,000?